14.11.2002
Monumental historical study
Alan Woods, 'Bolshevism: the road to revolution', Wellred, 1999, pp636, £15
This book, by Ted Grant's most senior collaborator in the Socialist Appeal group, still doggedly engaged in Labour Party entryism, is one of the finest historical/analytical works the Trotskyist movement has ever produced. It is obviously the product of many years of study, including of much original Russian source material (the author is a fluent scholar of such sources), and its historiography, its in-depth analysis of the history of Bolshevism and the many programmatic, tactical and organisational lessons to be drawn from that history are of the highest quality. Indeed, it is on a par with Deutscher's biographical trilogy on Trotsky, and should be used as a reference in a similar way, particularly in the absence of a definitive Marxist biography of Lenin (which of course this book does not pretend to be) or a really authoritative history of the Bolshevik Party from the classical pre-war Trotskyist movement. It certainly buries the feeble pretensions of the late Grigory Zinoviev to have written a definitive or even half-decent history in his 1923 History of the Bolshevik Party - that dry, evasive and inferior work, with its proto-Stalinist overtones, conveniently stops in February 1917 (no doubt to spare its author the misfortune of having to elaborate his own ignominious role in the period of preparation for the October revolution itself). Comrade Woods's study, by contrast, gives a detailed account of the debates, controversies and clashes of political trends in that feverish period between the two revolutions - from his standpoint as an orthodox Trotskyist, of course. If his views are sometimes problematic, particularly on the question of the exact origin of Lenin's 1917 April theses - as a development and extension of Lenin's own pre-existing understanding of the nature of the Russian Revolution, or conversely an 'adoption' of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, and open to some historical disputation - nevertheless he gives enough of an account of the theoretical background and course of evolution of the protagonists to help readers to judge for themselves. The question itself, of course, has only a programmatic significance in retrospect with regard to the various struggles between the rising Stalinist elite in the USSR and the opposition, which did not always generate models of programmatic or historical lucidity. In that sense, comrade Woods's insistence on this point is more a reflection of preoccupations that considerably post-date the actual material his book is devoted to. However, this is a fairly minor and understandable flaw, given the historical context in which it was written, and does not detract from the enormous usefulness of this work. The analysis is not confined to elaboration of the role of the Bolsheviks in 1917. His treatment of the entire history of Russian Marxism is remarkably well argued and elaborated. Right from the very earliest days, when the first tiny groups of Marxian communists - centred of course around the unbending, seemingly indefatigable figure of Georgi Plekhanov in the 1880s - emerged from the wreckage of populism, the treatment is unrivalled, at least in this reader's experience. It examines the many twists, turns and antagonistic relationships of all the evolving trends of an emerging, earth-shaking workers' movement - from legal Marxism to economism, to the shadings of differentiation within social democracy itself (as the communists then called themselves). The balanced treatment of the debate around 'spontaneity' and the famous formulation contained in What is to be done? is also useful. In this pamphlet Lenin seemingly wrote off the ability of the working class movement to generate anything other than bourgeois trade union politics and reformism without the intervention of some force from outside of the working class itself. Pointing out that this was in fact a polemical exaggeration against the economists, who precisely glorified the trade union consciousness of workers involved in small-scale economic struggles, the author gives a range of examples - from the Chartists to the Paris Commune, to the Spanish and French revolutionary events of the 1930s - where working class spontaneous consciousness far exceeded mere bourgeois trade unionism. Where Lenin was right, of course, was in combating the degradation of socialist politics by the economists to the level of bourgeois trade unionism, and emphasising subordination of the 'economic' struggle to politics, to explicitly revolutionary political demands, the struggle for democracy and the interests of all the oppressed. In comrade Woods's narrative, a very clear picture emerges of both the course of the revolution of 1905 and the relatively embryonic role within it of the social democrats, of whatever trend. That year's tumultuous events really only signified the bursting into the open of class antagonisms that had up to then been contained and kept in the background by the despotic tsarist regime. The relatively unconsolidated nature of the nascent trends in Russian social democracy was illustrated by the leftward turn of the Mensheviks in the context of the mass proletarian struggles of 1905, and the concomitant massive and irresistible pressure for unification of the social democrats. It is clear, however, that, while the immature spontaneity of the workers in 1905 led logically to the December Moscow insurrection, the shallow roots and limited revolutionary experience of the Marxist and quasi-Marxist trends meant that the struggles could not, at that point, have resulted in anything other than a fruitful defeat. It was only out of that defeated revolution that the real lines of division between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - surfacing just prior to 1905 and appearing to recede into the background in the tumult of that year - were consolidated into trends that thereby acquired world-historic significance. It might seem tautological to say that 1905 could not have been fought to a successful conclusion because of the immaturity of the revolutionary trends - unable to grasp the full implications of the divisions between them because of the spontaneous, often naive and immature consciousness and activism of the masses. But this is really only an observation on the dialectic whereby a revolutionary current establishes roots in the masses and lays the basis for future successes. The development of Marxism in Russia was a product not only of theoretical and programmatic struggles, but also of the fact that those struggles were based on an extensive revolutionary experience, painfully acquired, and with many sacrifices. It is another merit of comrade Woods' study that it gives a sufficiently detailed narrative of this whole process as to enable one to form the overview necessary to give this picture of revolutionary development flesh and blood. The period of reaction that followed the defeat at the end of 1905 thus was the decisive period that led to the consolidation of Bolshevism as a revolutionary current. By 1908-09 the bulk of social democracy inside Russia had been crushed and forced underground, its leaders driven into exile; enormous numbers of its supporters had seemingly abandoned politics in despair. Nevertheless this is the harsh environment where the steel was tempered that later brought down the Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie. There was, of course, the whole question of orientation - of recognising that the defeat of December 1905 really was the end of the revolutionary period. The eruption of mass peasant struggles, and of various waves of economic strikes, particularly in provincial towns and cities far from the centres of Moscow and St Petersburg, as well as the movement of sections of the class previously considered 'backward' in the aftermath of this defeat, made that extremely difficult at first. The whole question of boycotting the duma in 1906 was indicative of the dilemma of the revolutionaries. In the heat of revolution, in August 1905, the Bolsheviks had led a highly successful boycott of the pre-parliament convoked by the tsar and his 'constitutional' supporters with the aim of drawing the sting of the mass upsurge and deflecting it into safer channels. But by 1906, the whole situation had changed, and the logic of events thus pointed back in the opposite direction. The fact that Lenin was subsequently to acknowledge the error of this latter boycott only underlined the transitional nature of this moment from revolutionary advance to a defensive approach, seeking to take advantage of narrowing opportunities and seize any means available to address the broad working masses. It is something of a strength of comrade Woods's book that he emphasises that Lenin in particular fought against the tendency of some in his own ranks to ignore, through their tactics, the more backward layers of the working class and the masses in general, who lag behind the advanced elements. I certainly concur with that sentiment, though there is room for considerable debate about what this means contemporarily - the implicit polemic of comrade Woods in favour of his own tendency's immersion in Labour in this period of delabourisation of Labourism is, I feel, somewhat of a misanalogy. The post-1905 period of reaction posed a whole gamut of questions, as Woods lays out again in considerable detail. Legality at almost any price (Menshevism, in a nutshell) was set against the combination of legal work where possible with illegal work in which the Marxists could and did clandestinely tell the whole truth to the working class (which, equally in a nutshell, was the hallmark of Bolshevism as it evolved in the period of reaction). What of the bourgeoisie and its role in the revolution, which was the principled question that underlay these apparently 'tactical' differences? While the Mensheviks regarded the bourgeoisie - proven to be counterrevolutionary - as the class that must be the real beneficiary of the overthrow of tsarism and therefore must not be 'frightened away' by revolutionary activism, the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, saw the working class and poor peasantry both as the driving force of the democratic revolution against tsarism and the bourgeoisie, and the detonator of the international socialist revolution, which was inseparable from the real victory of socialism in backward Russia. It is hard to do justice to these kinds of questions, which are of course indispensable in elaborating the real development of the party of the revolution, in a review like this - questions such as the fight with the boycotters and semi-mystical 'god-builders' on the ultra-left fringe of the Bolshevik Party, a struggle that was complementary to that against the proto-reformism of the Mensheviks; or that of guerrilla warfare as a subsidiary and subordinate aspect of the tactics of a revolutionary party in some circumstances; and many others. All this led up to the revival of the Russian revolutionary movement from 1912, as the hard political struggle for a correct revolutionary orientation waged by Lenin and his close collaborators intersected so perfectly with political developments: in a period of rising militancy and receptivity to revolutionary ideas, the now case-hardened Bolshevik Party, having established itself as in independent party in 1912, was able to put itself at the head of the masses during this heady pre-war period. The Bolsheviks achieved a real commanding position as a party in this period, to the point of attracting significant forces from their opponents, the pro-party Mensheviks. Woods is able to show, with extensive statistics and material from original sources, that this was not an accidental phenomenon. In the volatile atmosphere after the massacre in the Lena goldfields in 1913 - a repeat of the tsarist atrocity of Bloody Sunday 1905 - Russia was right on the brink of revolution. Yet it was forestalled - by yet another tumultuous setback and change of material circumstances for all the trends in the Russian working class movement with the outbreak of European-wide war in 1914. The Bolsheviks, having achieved this mass influence and effective leadership over the proletariat, saw it torn away in the massive wave of chauvinism that swept through the working classes of all the belligerent imperialist states on the outbreak of war. It was fear of precisely this kind of reversal, of course, as well as the prior reformist degeneration in the more advanced countries, which led to the capitulation of the bulk of the social democratic leaderships in the face of imperialist war. Woods's book is again particularly useful in the light it casts as an overview of how the Bolsheviks fared in their own country, given their refusal to succumb to this trend. The whole situation resolved itself into a prolonged factional struggle, both on a national and international plane, against the same kinds of opponents: social chauvinists, centrists, and various shades of pacifists and anarchists. Indeed, the war acted in a perverse way as a kind of a leveller: it brought to the advanced European countries the same kind of tests as had been faced by socialists and revolutionaries in tsarist Russia for their entire political lives - needless to say, western social democrats were found wanting, whereas the Russian revolutionaries, tempered by extensive experience of both upsurge and repression, were well equipped to survive, and even later to thrive, in these conditions. Woods's account of the revolution is particularly marked by an extensive account of the whole question of 'peaceful revolution', as elaborated by Lenin, in 1917 itself. This of course, is somewhat to be expected from the comrades of the former Militant Tendency, whose perspectives have manifested themselves in a parliamentary schema as the road to socialism, certainly in Britain. Yet Woods's own narrative of Lenin's views is pretty well faithful to the facts - for in Russia in 1917 the very possibility of a relatively peaceful transfer of power arose from the fact that the tsarist state machine, which of course the bourgeoisie also relied on to protect its profits and its property from the working class, had been cracked wide open in the February revolution. To the point in fact, that the bourgeoisie itself was obliged to engage in extra-legal intrigue and plotting - most notably the Kornilov conspiracy - in order to attempt to reconsolidate an effective repressive apparatus. This set of circumstances, while hardly conforming to any stereotype of the intact bourgeois state being simply militarily smashed from without by armed workers' militias, does not conform either to the parliamentary prejudices of the Labour left that Militant adhered to in its heyday. The driving force of the revolution was not some parliamentary enabling act; its relatively bloodless transition was a product of the fact that the bourgeoisie had been deprived from below of most of its armed power before it was removed from office by a simple push. There are some other questionable points. For example, while comrade Woods is correct about the "honest defencism" that the workers exhibited, particularly after February 1917, it would be incorrect to generalise from this - as his comrades have often done in adapting to chauvinist tendencies in the working class in Britain at various important times in the past. However, comrade Woods's account of the initially undifferentiated nature of the soviets is useful. After February 1917 they were extremely amorphous, to the point of having a large and influential petty-bourgeois component within them. This is relevant with regard to contemporary Argentina, where similar events have occured, unfortunately in the context of a much more confused and enfeebled international left. But these are really only vignettes - there are so many things that could be distilled from this quite monumental historical study of what is, after all, the seminal, defining event of both the last century, and of the socialist and communist movement as a whole. It deserves to be widely read and studied, critically, and perhaps used as a starting point for further study of its subject matter. But above all, it should be recognised as a major work of communist political history in its own right. Ian Donovan
Worker